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Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm

Ben Lamm is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a company dedicated to genetic engineering and de-extinction projects. Colossal’s mission includes bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and advancing conservation efforts through cutting-edge biotechnology. https://www.colossal.com

Ben LammguestJoe Roganhost
Apr 7, 20252h 57mWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 0:0015:00

    (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

    1. BL

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. NA

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) All right, we're up. What's up, Ben?

    4. BL

      Hey, thanks so much for having me.

    5. JR

      My pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man. So, uh, why don't you, instead of me ex- why don't you explain to people what you do?

    6. BL

      So, I'm, uh, the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

    7. JR

      Yeah. And-

    8. BL

      (laughs)

    9. JR

      ... uh, that is a wild thing. I mean, this is, uh, essentially, um, literally wild. This is essentially real life Jurassic Park.

    10. BL

      Yeah, we get to Jurassic Park c- occasionally. Like, believe it or not, we get to that.

    11. JR

      (coughs) Of course. I mean-

    12. BL

      I gotta drop my hydrogen tablet in there, so-

    13. JR

      Oh, you do those? The Gary Brecka ones, right?

    14. BL

      Oh, yeah. I'm all in.

    15. JR

      Those are great.

    16. BL

      Yeah, so.

    17. JR

      Yeah, I love those. Um-

    18. BL

      I just didn't want you to think it was, we were going a different direction-

    19. JR

      How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this?

    20. BL

      So, I kind of fell into it. I didn't plan, I didn't wake up and say, "I saw Jurassic Park, I'm super stoked, I love animals, I wanna go work on this." Um, I'm just a weirdly curious person. So, there's this guy named George Church, and if you don't know George, you should look him up. He's the father of synthetic biology. He's at Harvard University. He's f- six foot seven with narcolepsy. He's just the best, right? So, if you've ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's just, he's the absolute best. He's a genius. And I thought, uh, my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right? And so, I, I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life, and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better. Like, how do we do directed evolution and how, and how that can apply to, like, crops and animals and all kinds of stuff. So, I get on the phone with George, and I ask him my questions. He answers them in, like, six seconds 'cause he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab. In that process, he's like, "You know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things." I was like, "Wait, wait, what?" And I was like, "If you had one project, w- what, is it this mammoth project?" And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them in the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human healthcare. And I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that, like, the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with was a joke. Well, then I stayed up all night just googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line. Whether it was in 60 Minutes or, you know, Stephen Colbert, or whatever he was in, there was this weird mammoth through line, where he was just obsessed with these mammoths. And everyone kind of wanted him to do this. So, I called him back the next day. Seven days later, I'm in his lab and we were off to the races on, okay, we're gonna try to go build a company to bring back extinct species.

    21. JR

      So, how do you decide what to start with?

    22. BL

      So, we started with the mammoth first, right, 'cause George, you know, uh, had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. Uh, we thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation. There was some ecological modeling that had been done that shows that ma- the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild, uh, could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem. Um, and so that was an easy place to start. After we launched, the company went crazy viral. And all these other folks from de-extinction research started calling us, like folks from, like, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, which looks like a mythical creature, it's awesome.

    23. JR

      Yeah.

    24. BL

      Um, the, uh, Beth Shapiro with the dodo, everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding, you know, our, our entire set.

    25. JR

      So, how does one do this? So like, let's, uh, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing-

    26. BL

      (laughs)

    27. JR

      ... before that, how does one do this? Like, (clears throat) w- from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth.

    28. BL

      Yeah, let me walk through the whole process.

    29. JR

      Please, yeah.

    30. BL

      So, first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So, the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate. So, we definitely need, uh, to find a lot of samples. So, we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome.

  2. 15:0030:00

    Wow. …

    1. BL

      thylacine skull in there. There's pictures of it online and everything. And we used that to get to a 99.9% complete genome, because we also had the ancestry of the two, of the, uh, uh, pup and mother.

    2. JR

      Wow.

    3. BL

      Yeah. So there's, there's some probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being, you know, fully utilized.

    4. JR

      So, if you have 98% or you have 99%, what, what's the process of-

    5. BL

      Oh, yeah.

    6. JR

      ... going from that?

    7. BL

      So-

    8. JR

      So here's the head.

    9. BL

      Yeah. There's the head, there's the, uh, head in the bucket.

    10. JR

      Wow.

    11. BL

      So, Andrew Pask, who leads our, um, uh, in partnership with University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work. And, uh, yeah, that's the head in the bucket. I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's petrous bones, which we'll talk about at some point.

    12. JR

      Do you buy into any of these sightings?

    13. BL

      No. I did. So, Andrew Pask, for years, he's been working on it for 15 years. He's amazing, he's awesome. Uh, he's been working on, on like a shoestring budget, and that's part of the problem with de-extinction is nobody's put real capital into it until now. And he's been working on it for 15 years, and he's had people send him, you know, uh, poop, uh, uh, clippings from, you know, hair, and all this stuff over the years. They just send it to him, and then he loves the thylacine so much, he just sequences it, and he's like, "Nope, it's a dog. You sent me more dog shit. Thanks."

    14. JR

      (laughs)

    15. BL

      I mean, it's l- it's, it's demoralizing. But, like, when I got into thylacine, you know, we met Andrew, we did a partnership with him. We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research, more than the Australian government. We made a, the largest investment in, in research for marsupial development of anyone. So we do this, um, and then you, you get into the myth of it, right? So you start reading it, right? You start reading, I start reading all the books on the thylacine. I want to be as, I get obsessive about projects. And so, I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now. And so, got super deep in it, and, uh, then I started calling Pask. I was like, "Hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos, and I kind of think they're still there." And Pask is like, "No, no, stop it. Don't go down that rabbit hole." I, so I, I don't believe that they're there.

    16. JR

      Well, why did he say that?

    17. BL

      Uh, well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years all over Tasmania, right? So not just southern Australia, but all-

    18. JR

      Right.

    19. BL

      ... over Tasmania.

    20. JR

      So samples, poop and stuff like that?

    21. BL

      Samples, just everything.

    22. JR

      Right.

    23. BL

      Using camera traps. And nobody's s-... I, I think that they officially say that, uh, the thylacine went extinct in 1936.

    24. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. BL

      But probably into the late '40s and early '50s, they still existed. But, I mean, I think you, I think it's very unlikely that one still exists. It'd make our lives a lot easier if they existed.

    26. JR

      Forrest really believes in it.

    27. BL

      He does. He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.

    28. JR

      Hmm.

    29. BL

      Because-

    30. JR

      Because of sightings?

  3. 30:0045:00

    (laughs) …

    1. BL

      Colossal Foundation, uh, about two and a half years ago is, uh, doing a population genomics map. We talked about bio-banking a little bit. So what we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity? What's been lost, you know? H- what's the number of inbreeding? So we go through this whole process to try to understand, and then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox. It's one of the largest, uh, indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota. So we're giving them a report out on this. We, we, we went to their nation, wanted to share this. And, and then, you know, we're curious, so we said, "What other projects would you work on if, if that you, that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison?" And they said that they, that we needed to help with wolf conservation, and they brought up that. They said that we needed to help with more bison conservation. Uh, they said if we could do stuff around, um, uh, eagles and fish. And so, we kind of got that feedback. And when, um, Chairman Fox was walking me through their, their herital- their, uh, Cultural Heritage Museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of, of a white wolf. And he said, "You know, that's the great wolf." And, uh, and he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost, and how many people believed, um, uh, that it could've even been a dire wolf. And I was like, "From Game of Thrones? That's cool. I love the show. That's interesting."

    2. JR

      (laughs)

    3. BL

      So we did that. We, we talked about that. Um, and then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina, and, uh, understanding that, uh, uh, for a completely different meeting around financing. And in that meeting, it, the Red Wolf Program came up. I don't know if you know anything about the red wolf.

    4. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. BL

      But it's kind of a disaster.

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. BL

      You know, it's the only endemic wolf to Amer- that's only endemic to America. It's a red wolf. Uh, it's beautiful. And, uh, there's like 15 left in the wild.... it would- with massive loss of, of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck. And, uh, and I was like, "Wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation? We can't save our own..." When you think of, like, the American West, right, you think of wolves, you think of, like, uh, you know, eagles soaring, you think of, like, trout- bears catching trout, you, you know, you think of bison. The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, like... Uh, we were like, "We have to do something about this."

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. BL

      "We have to figure something out." So, we, we put that kind of on the list, and then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years sen- and teachers sen- and parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths, or dodos, or .......................... Like, we get, like, s- boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool. So, we're gonna make a Colossal Kids Corner, um, at our new, new, uh, labs. And, and in that, we've had all this, some Hollywood talent, like, you know, Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business. They're just excited about it. Most of them learned about it through their kids-

    10. JR

      Hmm.

    11. BL

      ... kind of like with the woolly mouse with you. And so everyone's excited about it. And then, um, we talked again to MHA Nation. They brought up the dire wolf again. And so we thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species 'cause dire wolves were only found in, in the US, uh, little, uh, in, in North America, but predominantly in the United States, uh, uh, uh, coastal United States. And, um, we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also, uh, help wolf conservation and bring people from, like, sci-fi, fantasy, and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation, we thought it was a cool idea, but we had no idea if we could pull it off.

    12. JR

      Is there dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost or is-

    13. BL

      No. Most are... Most of the dire wolf skulls out there, uh, there's thousands of them in La Brea Tar Pits. So, if you go there-

    14. JR

      Ah.

    15. BL

      ... they have this beautiful wall, but because of heat and aci- acid- acidification, there isn't anything that's protected. Like, there's nothing you can get from that. But, uh, uh, about six years ago, uh, a group, including Beth Shapiro, our chief science officer, uh, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth, right? And in that tooth, they actually found a, uh, uh... They actually got 0.15X or coverage of the genome, so they got about 15% of the genome. But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10X, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times so that even if there are gaps, you understuff- understand enough of the core kind of, uh, coding regions that you could bring back that animal. Or-

    16. JR

      Is this done by AI? Is this done by programs?

    17. BL

      It's done by AI and software, yeah.

    18. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    19. BL

      So, we, we built, um... Part of our business model is building technologies, uh, to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than, you know, just solving them for, you know, existing species. Open-sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out. So, our first, uh, computational analysis company was called Form Bio, and we actually spun it out of the business.

    20. JR

      So, you have this tooth. You have 1.5.

    21. BL

      Yeah, uh, 1.5, so 15% of the genome.

    22. JR

      Okay.

    23. BL

      Um, and so I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, "Could you re-sample the tooth?" And she's like, "It, it's like, you know, half an inch long." She's like, "It's destructive sampling. Like, it's going to ruin us." Well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible? So, we, we lucked out and that tooth's 13,000 years old. The skull itself is, uh, 72, 73,000 years old. Not exactly sure. Uh, but it was found in a riverbed, um, and it wasn't found in, uh, a riverbed at the mouth of a cave. So, it wasn't found, like, in, in, uh, the permafrost. It also wasn't found in, like, heat and acid- aci- acidification. So, uh, there's a bone in all of us called the petrous bone, which is insanely dense, and it doesn't change a lot from after you're born. It's a great DNA storage. Better than teeth, better than anything.

    24. JR

      Where is it?

    25. BL

      It's on the... It's, like, s- in the inner ear kind of head area.

    26. JR

      Hmm.

    27. BL

      And so, um, we got permission from the museum to, uh, very carefully, uh, drill into the back, the underside of the skull, and remove, uh, the petrous bone to see if we could get DNA. And we got really lucky. Between re-sampling the first and, um, the in- in the skull, we ended up getting about 13 to 14X coverage, so that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the dire wolves.

    28. JR

      And then what'd you do?

    29. BL

      (laughs) Well, and then...

    30. JR

      (laughs)

  4. 45:001:00:00

    Yeah. So- …

    1. JR

      fucking crazy.

    2. BL

      Yeah. So-

    3. JR

      That's the pup.

    4. BL

      Yeah. So this is, uh ... So that's actually, uh, Romulus as ... So, we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, uh, founders of Roam, and then, uh, and then we have Khaleesi, who's the new girl.

    5. JR

      (laughs)

    6. BL

      So, this is Romulus and Remus. Uh, so funny, funny story about this. So, Peter Jackson, uh, from Lord of the Rings, um-

    7. JR

      Jamie.

    8. BL

      Uh, s- uh, Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings, uh, was actually, uh, one of our investors, and he has this huge museum in Wellington that he's building for all these movie props. And he's like ... We were ... I was sitting in, in Peter's, uh, house with ... He and his, he and his partner Fran, and I was like, "You know," um, uh ... I showed him the video of them howling. He started tearing up and he goes, "This is the first time I've heard a dire wolf, or anyone's heard a dire wolf in 10,000 years." He started ... Well, he like, he like physically, emotionally got chills and started crying. And then he's like, "Well, you know I do have the throne." I was like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "I bought the throne last week at auction." It was at, at a, at a private auction from like Sotheby's or someone, right?

    9. JR

      (laughs)

    10. BL

      And so, so he did, and it just happened to be where the wolves were doing their vet checkup. Like, talk about cosmic coincidence. Incredible, right?

    11. JR

      Wow.

    12. BL

      And so, um, you know, what you don't see in this photo is you don't see the fact that we have American Humane Society there with three veterinary people. We had six people from our, uh, uh, animal care team.

    13. JR

      When you say checkup, you don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?

    14. BL

      Uh, they do get ... They ... Because of viruses from that ... they can get from the soil, uh, at s- uh, eight, at eight weeks, they do get basic virus. Uh, they do, they do get basic vaccines.

    15. JR

      Oh, were you concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you're just-

    16. BL

      Yeah, so these are staying on ... You know, like these are not going back into the wild, right?

    17. JR

      Right, not yet.

    18. BL

      N- ye- n- Right now, they're on a 2,000 acre, uh, secure, expansive ecological preserve with 24/7 care. We have, we have an animal hospital that we built.

    19. JR

      Wow.

    20. BL

      Uh, people are always like, "You guys raise so much money." And I was like, "Well, it ... The ... Because we didn't just spend it on the labs. You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities, and whatnot."

    21. JR

      Yeah. Let's see-

    22. BL

      We have-

    23. JR

      ... the photo of the, the actual grown ones, because they're fucking nuts. Um, yeah.

    24. BL

      Yeah, so, so this is, uh, Romulus and Remus, uh, in ... Playing in the snow on the preserve when they are, um, uh, three months old. (laughs)

    25. JR

      So three months, how big are they?

    26. BL

      Uh, three months, they were north of 45 pounds.

    27. JR

      Wow.

    28. BL

      So, um-

    29. JR

      Look at that face. God, they're so beautiful.

    30. BL

      Oh, they just get, they just get ... Like, as they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful.

  5. 1:00:001:06:30

    Mmm. …

    1. BL

      out there. They, um ... We have another probably 40 advisors that are like, "We love you."... we, just, you can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me. If I submit a paper, they're ... And we totally agree with you and we'll help you, but-

    2. JR

      Mmm.

    3. BL

      ... we submit a paper, they judge my paper, it gets rejected, then I don't get my grant, so then I can't continue my research. I have to fire my post-docs. So it's a complete scam of a system, right? And so, we, we went through this phase where it's like, we didn't have enough scientists, we didn't have labs, we didn't have money, we weren't doing anything for conservation. So, we went through this whole, like, philosophical perspec- uh, uh, of these, like, these, all these things that people threw abou- threw at us, uh, from the scientific community. And some of our biggest people that hate us are people that we denied their funding. (laughs)

    4. JR

      Of course.

    5. NA

      (laughs)

    6. JR

      Well, the, the problem is not the scientific community. The problem is weak men. It's this, this, uh, what you see in these, these squabbles, these, like, ultra-personal squabbles, where, like, horrible vitriolic statements made about people, h- like-

    7. BL

      They're just not happy people.

    8. JR

      Exactly. It's the same problem with all of life. It's these bitchy little people, these bitchy little monsters, and they have taken-

    9. BL

      (laughs)

    10. JR

      ... over something that's incredibly important, and their work, their work, these bitchy little people, their work is incredibly important.

    11. BL

      Yes.

    12. JR

      But at the core of their being, they're a bitchy little person.

    13. BL

      And they c- and that's why, and that is why we don't have flying cars-

    14. JR

      (laughs)

    15. BL

      ... we don't have mammoths, and until Elon, we're not gonna live on Mars, right? And so, like, we didn't have, like, I think-

    16. JR

      Well, it takes time.

    17. BL

      ... it, yeah, but it, it doesn't come ... But also, academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems, right? So if you wanna go to Mars or you wanna bring back a mammoth, you have to design the entire system, and you have to innovate across everything.

    18. JR

      Right.

    19. BL

      Whereas in academia, you're, you are only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved.

    20. JR

      Well, it's also, you're, you're dealing with grants and enormous amounts of money that gets donated and, and given to these institutions, along with a whole ideology. Like, it's not just as simple as let's follow data. It's all gotta be attached to this very left-leaning, almost preposterous in some aspects, ideology.

    21. BL

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      And everyone has to say things, as a fucking scientist, that you know is not true.

    23. BL

      Y- c- you should just follow the scientific method.

    24. JR

      Exactly.

    25. BL

      I'm not a scientist, but we should just ... And guess what? When new data shows up that, uh, you know, changes your old data, you shouldn't get mad about that. You should celebrate it.

    26. JR

      Exactly. Well, also, you have to look at all data. You know, like, uh, I don't want to get into this, but, uh, like, if you, you have, uh, uh, academics who are l- legitimate scientists and have published papers who are telling you that a man can be a woman, and which is fine in terms of, like, who you are. But now, when you're having them compete with women in sports, you've entered into n- n- nonsense land, and you're the person we're counting on to be the most intelligent person on the subject. You're trapped by an ideology that you're now w- ignoring biology in favor of sociology.

    27. BL

      I just wish we could get philosophy, uh, we separate ph- like, philosophical perspectives from science. We d-

    28. JR

      Yes.

    29. BL

      One of the, one of the things that we fight about all the time, you know, because (laughs) it's like, once we got the scientists, and once we got the money, and once we proved that we are the most advanced, you know, synthetic biology company in the world, once In-Q-Tel, which is a, a, uh, uh, the funding arm of the CIA and other governments started investing in Colossal because of our technologies, um, and once we started to prove points, the, the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical ones.

    30. JR

      Hm.

Episode duration: 2:57:34

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